Download or read book Patricia Highsmith Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941 1995 written by Patricia Highsmith and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 1413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021 The Times (of London) • Best Books of the Year Excerpted in The New Yorker Profiled in The Los Angeles Times Publishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times). Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet—with tantalizing instructions to be read. For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable figure behind the legendary pen. Beginning with her junior year at Barnard in 1941, Highsmith ritualistically kept a diary and notebook—the former to catalog her day, the latter to brainstorm stories and hone her craft. This volume weaves diary and notebook simultaneously, exhibiting precisely how Highsmith’s personal affairs seeped into her fiction—and the sheer darkness of her own imagination. Charming yet teetering on the egotistical, young “Pat” lays bare her dizzying social life in 1940s Greenwich Village, barhopping with Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles, among others. Alongside Flannery O’Conner and Chester Himes, she attended—at the recommendation of Truman Capote—the Yaddo artist colony in 1948, where she drafted Strangers on a Train. Published in 1950 and soon adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, this debut novel brought recognition and brief financial security, but left a heartsick Highsmith agonizing: “What is the life I choose?” Providing extraordinary insights into gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century America, Highsmith’s diaries convey her euphoria writing The Price of Salt (1951). Yet her sophomore novel would have to be published under a pseudonym, so as not to tarnish her reputation. Indeed, no one could anticipate commercial reception for a novel depicting love between two women in the McCarthy era. Seeking relief from America, Highsmith catalogs her peripatetic years in Europe, subsisting on cigarettes and growing more bigoted and satirical with age. After a stay in Positano with a new lover, she reflects in her notebooks on being an expat, and gleefully conjures the unforgettable The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); it would be this sociopathic antihero who would finally solidify her true fame. At once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must be “a few usable things in literature.” A memoir as significant in our own century as Sylvia Plath’s journals and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman’s rise against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence.

Download or read book A Carnival of Snackery written by David Sedaris and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice There’s no right way to keep a diary, but if there’s an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mas­tered it. If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leap­ing to his death. There’s a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party—lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs. These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harm­less laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background—new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can’t by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.

Download or read book Four Thousand Weeks written by Oliver Burkeman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Provocative and appealing . . . well worth your extremely limited time." —Barbara Spindel, The Wall Street Journal The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks. Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless battle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern fixation on “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.

Download or read book The Talented Miss Highsmith written by Joan Schenkar and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-01-18 with total page 733 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the novelist who created Tom Ripley that is “both dazzling and definitive . . . as original as its contemptible, miserable, irresistible subject” (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book * A Lambda Literary Award Winner * An Edgar Award Nominee * An Agatha Award Nominee * A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of twentieth-century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her famed “hero-criminal,” the talented Tom Ripley. Joan Schenkar maps out this richly bizarre life from her birth in Texas to Hitchcock’s filming of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, to her long, strange self-exile in Europe. We see her as a secret writer for the comics, a brilliant creator of disturbing fictions, and an erotic predator with dozens of women (and a few good men) on her love list. The Talented Miss Highsmith is the first literary biography with access to Highsmith’s whole story: her closest friends, her oeuvre, her archives. It’s a compulsive page-turner unlike any other, a book worthy of Highsmith herself. “Schenkar’s writing is witty, sharp and light-handed, a considerable achievement given the immense detail.” —Jeanette Winterson, The New York Times Book Review “This is no ordinary biography . . . The Talented Miss Highsmith breaks much ground in connecting Highsmith’s diabolical tales with the real women who prompted her strongest passions.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Captures the writer in all her sullen, sinister, ambivalent glory.” —Tina Jordan, Entertainment Weekly

Download or read book Big Apple Diaries written by Alyssa Bermudez and published by Roaring Brook Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Big Apple Diaries, a heartfelt diary-style graphic memoir by Alyssa Bermudez, a young New Yorker doodles her way through middle school—until the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack leaves her wondering if she can ever be a kid again. It’s the year 2000 in New York City. For 12-year old Alyssa, a biracial Puerto Rican girl, this means all kinds of new challenges: splitting time between her dad's apartment in Manhattan and her mom's new place in Queens, navigating the ups and downs of middle school, harboring an epic crush on a new classmate, and figuring out how to be a "real" Puerto Rican. The only way to make sense of it all is to write and draw her thoughts and worries into her diary. Then life abruptly changes on September 11, 2001. After the Twin Towers fall and so many lives are lost, her concerns about gossip, crushes, and fashion feel distant and insignificant. Alyssa must find a new sense of self and purpose amidst all of the chaos, and find strength to move forward with hope. This moving graphic memoir is based on Alyssa Bermudez's own middle school diaries.

Download or read book Sleepless written by Annabel Abbs-Streets and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2024-02-13 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why women’s brains work differently at night—and how we can harness that altered state for greater creativity, insight, and courage. In the winter of 2020, Annabel Abbs-Streets experienced a series of losses: her stepfather, then father, and finally her family’s puppy. Unmoored by grief, she couldn’t sleep. But she discovered something surprising: during her wakeful nights, the darkness became a place of sanctuary, filled with creativity, reflection, and wonder. And once she stopped fighting her insomnia, Annabel tapped into something mysterious and beguiling: her Night Self. In the tradition of books like Breath and Wintering, Sleepless combines science, historical research, and personal experience to explore the complicated relationship women have with darkness. Her night journeys range from quiet country fields to brightly lit city streets to the darkest reaches of the Arctic Circle. And from women of the past—Lee Krasner, Virginia Woolf, Louise Bourgeois, and dozens more—who opened their minds on sleepless nights, to contemporary women who found a form of healing in darkness. From moth hunters to astronomers, from artists to photographers, Annabel found she wasn’t alone. Cut loose from the anxiety of insomnia, numerous women discovered strength, imagination, and inner knowledge at night. Many also learned to—finally—sleep.

Download or read book Incest written by Anaïs Nin and published by HMH. This book was released on 1993-09-16 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The trailblazing memoirist and author of Henry & June recounts her relationships with Henry Miller and others—including her own father. Anaïs Nin wrote in her uncensored diaries like they were a broad-minded confidante with whom she shared the liberating psychosexual dramas of her life. In this continuation of her notorious Henry & June, she recounts a particularly turbulent period between 1932 and 1934, and the men who dominated it: her protective husband, her therapist, and the poet Antonin Artaud. However, most consuming of all is novelist Henry Miller—a man whose genius, said Anaïs, was so demonic it could drive people insane. Here too, recounted in extraordinary detail, is the sexual affair she had with her father. At once loving, exciting, and vengeful, it was the ultimate social transgression for which Anaïs would eventually seek absolution from her analysts. “Before Lena Dunham there was Anaïs Nin. Like Dunham, she’s been accused of narcissism, sociopathy, and sexual perversion time and again. Yet even that comparison undercuts the strangeness and bravery of her work, for Nin was the first of her kind. And, like all truly unique talents, she was worshipped by some, hated by many, and misunderstood by most . . . A woman who’d spent decades on the bleeding edge of American intellectual life, a woman who had been a respected colleague of male writers who pushed the boundaries of acceptable sex writing. Like many great . . . experimentalists, she wrote for a world that did not yet exist, and so helped to bring it into being.” —The Guardian Includes an introduction by Rupert Pole

Download or read book Anxious Am I written by Alan A. Block and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-03-17 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following a lifetime rooted in family, schools, culture, and psychotherapy, provoked by the query of a daughter concerning the presence of anxiety in my life, this memoir pursues the presence of anxiety in life and seeks in some context for the concerns with which the author has lived for three-quarters of a century. In the reflections from these situations and influences, he works his way back to stories of personal origin and growth. He has sauntered through persistent issues with which he has been engaged throughout his life, and he has made a few pronouncements, some of which might even ring true. Within these pages, a little wisdom may even be found. And hopefully, with some love and concern, he has responded to the challenging question, “Do you have anxiety?”

Download or read book Home Front Girl written by Joan Wehlen Morrison and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2012-11 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wednesday, December 10, 1941"Hitler speaks to Reichstag tomorrow. We just heard the first casualty lists over the radio. ... Lots of boys from Michigan and Illinois. Oh my God! ... Life goes on though. We read our books in the library and eat lunch, bridge, etc. Phy. Sci. and Calculus. Darn Descartes. Reading Walt Whitman now." This diary of a smart, astute, and funny teenager provides a fascinating record of what an everyday American girl felt and thought during the Depression and the lead-up to World War II. Young Chicagoan Joan Wehlen describes her daily life growing up in the city and

Download or read book Ideal Beauty written by Lois W. Banner and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the silver screen’s greatest beauties, Greta Garbo was also one of its most profound enigmas. A star in both silent pictures and talkies, Garbo kept viewers riveted with understated performances that suggested deep melancholy and strong desires roiling just under the surface. And offscreen, the intensely private Garbo was perhaps even more mysterious and alluring, as her retirement from Hollywood at age thirty-six only fueled the public’s fascination. Ideal Beauty reveals the woman behind the mystique, a woman who overcame an impoverished childhood to become a student at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Academy, an actress in European films, and ultimately a Hollywood star. Chronicling her tough negotiations with Louis B. Mayer at MGM, it shows how Garbo carved out enough power in Hollywood to craft a distinctly new feminist screen presence in films like Queen Christina. Banner draws on over ten years of in-depth archival research in Sweden, Germany, France, and the United States to demonstrate how, away from the camera’s glare, Garbo’s life was even more intriguing. Ideal Beauty takes a fresh look at an icon who helped to define female beauty in the twentieth century and provides answers to much-debated questions about Garbo’s childhood, sexuality, career, illnesses and breakdowns, and spiritual awakening.

Download or read book Nearer the Moon written by Anaïs Nin and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 1996 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: She remains torn between three men: Henry Miller, whose detached self-immersion and artistic "impersonality" both attract and repel her; Gonzalo More, a sensitive and attentive but jealous lover who drives her to distraction; and Hugh Guiler, her faithful husband, who provides a calm center for Nin. In addition, a wide circle of family, friends, and admirers makes demands on Nin's time and emotional energy.

Download or read book The Hard Crowd written by Rachel Kushner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A career-spanning anthology of essays on politics and culture by the best-selling author of The Flamethrowers includes entries discussing a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal Baja Peninsula motorcycle race, and the 1970s Fiat factory wildcat strikes.

Download or read book Tiny Love Stories written by Daniel Jones and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Charming. . . . A moving testament to the diversity and depths of love.” —Publishers Weekly You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll be swept away—in less time than it takes to read this paragraph. Here are 175 true stories—honest, funny, tender and wise—each as moving as a lyric poem, all told in no more than one hundred words. An electrician lights up a woman’s life, a sister longs for her homeless brother, strangers dream of what might have been. Love lost, found and reclaimed. Love that’s romantic, familial, platonic and unexpected. Most of all, these stories celebrate love as it exists in real life: a silly remark that leads to a lifetime together, a father who struggles to remember his son, ordinary moments that burn bright.

Download or read book Whore of New York written by Liara Roux and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why would someone ever voluntarily become a sex worker? Liara Roux writes about the salacious details leading up to her decision to become a career sex worker, and the unexpected truths she learned while working in the industry. Liara Roux is accustomed to being mislabelled and misunderstood. As a child, Liara’s inquisitive, instinctive, and rebellious nature was frequently problematised in a world designed around the requirements of their neurotypical, cis, heterosexual male colleagues. Coming of age in an oppressively restrictive home, they shuffled tarot and explored self portraiture to rationalise the injustice of chronic pain, toxic lovers, and the cruel silence of divinity. Critiquing capitalism’s mechanisms of exploitation, the conservatism of Western medicine, and the politics surrounding sex work, Whore of New York: Confessions of a Sinful Woman is a candid study of artistic awakening, and both spiritual and sexual growth after abuse, seen through the eyes of a proud outsider.

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Romantic Love written by Ann Brooks and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Romantic Love is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary reference work essential for students and researchers interested in the field of love, romance and popular romance fiction. This first-of-its-kind volume illustrates the broad and interdisciplinary nature of love studies. International contributors, including leaders in their field, reflect a range of perspectives from cultural studies, history, literature, popular romance studies, American studies, sociology and gender studies. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors the Companion is divided into 12 parts: Love, romance and historical and social change Love and feminist discourses Love and popular romance fiction Love, gender and sexuality Romancing Australia South and Southeast Asian romance communities Nation, place and identity in US popular romance novels Romantic love and national identity in Chinese and Taiwanese discourses of love Muslim and Middle Eastern romances Discourses of romance fiction and technologies of power Writing love and romance Legal and theological fiction and sexual politics This is an important and unique collection aimed at researchers and students across cultural studies, women and gender studies, literature studies and sociology.

Download or read book Modern Nature written by Derek Jarman and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1994.

Download or read book The Selected Journals of L M Montgomery written by Lucy Maud Montgomery and published by . This book was released on 2005-01-22 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elizabeth Waterston is a 2011 Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. The final volume of the immensely successful The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery covers the years 1935 to 1942, the year of Montgomery's death. No longer dwelling in a farm community or a small rural village, Lucy Maud Montgomery explored life in downtown Toronto. Here she experienced the cultural riches the city had to offer while finding friendship and neighbourliness in the suburb of Swansea. The journal chronicles her hopes and satisfaction with her new home and neighbourhood, but also her struggles with her own and her husband's recurring bouts of depression, her worries about her sons' academic performance, and her thoughts on the world events during these years. The final volume in the series offers an intimate eyewitness account of life in a growing city, a friendly neighbourhood, a changing world, and of a troubling family dynamic from 1935 to 1942, all recorded with Lucy Maud Montgomery's sharp eye and characteristic wit.